The Dark Side of the Street

Catriona Ward, The Last House On Needless Street

Ted Bannerman lives alone with his daughter and his cat, craving the ordinariness of small-town life. But his past won’t let him be ordinary. Eleven years ago, the police tore Ted’s house apart looking for a little girl who disappeared at a nearby tourist trap. Years later, that little girl’s sister hasn’t relinquished the search, and that search brings her to Needless Street, and the Pacific Northwest forest just beyond.

Sometimes I wonder what consequences M. Night Shyamalan has wrought on art. Genre audiences have come to expect twist endings and jolting revelations as their due. We (and this includes me) read or watch distractedly, browsing ahead to claim we accurately anticipated the twist. American-born British author Catriona Ward apparently knows this, and writes with the expectation that readers want a twist. Then she turns that smug expectation against us.

From the beginning, Ward dribbles out cues that horror readers have been carefully programmed to anticipate. We notice which information our unreliable narrators omit, and what inconsistencies they include. We notice, for instance, that Ted lavishes affection upon his daughter Lauren, but she doesn’t live with him full-time. Where does she go when she isn’t with him? Why does she swing abruptly between childlike glee and violent outbursts?

Ward’s story alternates between three viewpoint characters, and the world they describe is inconsistent. Ted is sweet and sympathetic, a big-hearted man-child who simply wants to love and be loved. But he also uses alcohol and pills to quiet a gnawing darkness, and hides indoors to avoid snooping judgment. He’s haunted by his absent but nagging mother, whom he still calls Mommy, despite being in his middle thirties.

Meanwhile, Ted’s cat Olivia wanders the spacious halls of Ted’s Victorian wedding-cake house. Her absolute, undying love for Ted isn’t merely sweet: Olivia believes the Lord commissioned her specifically to provide Ted the care he needs, though Olivia’s actual responsibilities are weird and contrary. Olivia reads her Bible and believes she has everything figured out, until she begins hearing a desperate voice calling from beneath the kitchen floor.

Catriona Ward

Outside Ted’s narrow world, Dee has spent eleven years seeking her missing sister Lulu. Her sister’s disappearance cost everything: her art-school scholarship, her parents’ marriage, and eventually, her father’s death. Finding Lulu has become Dee’s only mission, and her mission brings her to Washington, to Needless Street, to Ted. She’s convinced Ted knows more than he’ll admit. But discrepancies start creeping into Dee’s almost-religious narrative.

I’ll admit something: I almost didn’t finish this book. Indeed, I almost flung it aside early on, when Ted began describing “going away,” an apparent fugue state where hours, even days, disappear from his memory. The correlation of horror and mental illness is a shopworn tchotchke beloved by genre authors. But Ward presents Ted as so heartworn, almost loveable, that I felt compelled to see how this resolved itself.

I’m glad I did. Ted’s illness—given Ward’s storytelling approach, I don’t think revealing Ted’s illness counts as a spoiler—is subverted in ways that prove both sympathetic and insightful. Ted proves capable of both intense love and intense wrath. But exactly who receives Ted’s wrath matters, in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious at first. Ted apparently operates under deeper directions, and his anger serves specific psychological ends.

Because ultimately, Ward uses psychology to tell a complex, humane story. The world Ted, Olivia, and Dee share appears inconsistent to us outsiders because these characters lie to themselves so often, so persistently, that reality has become a footnote. Sure, Ward couches these lies in Jungian archetypes which horror readers will find familiar. But their lies matter less than the truths they strive, and fail, to conceal.

In the final reveal, we understand that Ward has concealed these truths through a certain amount of polite hand-waving. To overextend the Shyamalan metaphor, she’s used camera cuts and restricted POV to withhold information from us, the audience. But again, Ward realizes we readers expect that from our authors, and utilizes that expectation to tell a story that, eventually, exceeds the perceived commercial limits of her genre.

Some potential buyers may be asking themselves whether the book is scary. It’s marketed to horror audiences, after all. Yes, it has the gripping, nuanced dread of masters like Lovecraft and Hitchcock. Ward kept me up past my bedtime. But she also asks what monsters we’re willing to live with, in order to avoid bringing new monsters inside. These characters live with demons, sure. But who, exactly, invited them in?